Abraham Lincoln. John Torrey Morse

dramatic effect; an aged and broken man, he emerged from the retirement in which he seemed to have sought a brief rest before death should lay him low, and it was with an impressive air of sadness and of earnestness that he devoted the last remnants of his failing strength to save a country which he had served so long. His friends feared that he might not survive even a few months to reach the end of his patriotic task. On January 29, 1850, he laid before the Senate his "comprehensive scheme of adjustment." But it came not as oil upon the angry waters; every one was offended by one or another part of it, and at once there opened a war of debate which is among the most noteworthy and momentous in American history. Great men who belonged to the past and great men who were to belong to the future shared in the exciting controversies, which were prolonged over a period of more than half a year. Clay was constantly on his feet, doing battle with a voice which gained rather than lost force from its pathetic feebleness. "I am here," he solemnly said, "expecting soon to go hence, and owing no responsibility but to my own conscience and to God." Jefferson Davis spoke for the extension westward of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, with a proviso positively establishing slavery south of that line. Calhoun, from the edge of the grave, into which only a few weeks later he was to fall, once more faced his old adversaries. On March 4 he sat beside Mason of Virginia, while that gentleman read for him to a hushed audience the speech which he himself was too weak to deliver. Three days later Webster uttered that speech which made the seventh day of March almost as famous in the history of the United States as the Ides of the same month had been in that of Rome. In the eyes of the anti-slavery men of New England the fall of Webster was hardly less momentous than the fall of Caesar had appeared in the Eternal City. Seward also spoke a noteworthy speech, bringing upon himself infinite abuse by his bold phrase, a higher law than the Constitution. Salmon P. Chase followed upon the same side, in an exalted and prophetic strain. In that momentous session every man gave out what he felt to be his best, while anxious and excited millions devoured every word which the newspapers reported to them.

      Clay had imprudently gathered the several matters of his Compromise into one bill, which was soon sneeringly nicknamed "the Omnibus Bill." It was sorely harassed by amendments, and when at last, on July 31, the Omnibus reached the end of its journey, it contained only one passenger, viz., a territorial government for Utah. Its trip had apparently ended in utter failure. But a careful study of individual proclivities showed that not improbably those measures might be passed one by one which could not be passed in combination. In this hope, five several bills, being all the ejected contents of the Omnibus, were brought forward, and each in turn had the success which had been denied to them together. First: Texas received $10,000,000, and for this price magnanimously relinquished her unfounded claim upon New Mexico. Second: California was admitted as a free State. Third: New Mexico was organized as a Territory, with the proviso that when she should form a state constitution the slavery question should be determined by the people, and that during her territorial existence the question of property in a slave should be left undisturbed by congressional action, to be determined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Fourth: A more efficient Fugitive Slave Law was passed. Fifth: Slave trading in the District of Columbia was abolished. Such were the terms of an arrangement in which every man saw so much which he himself disliked that he felt sure that others must be satisfied. Each plumed himself on his liberality in his concessions nobly made in behalf of public harmony. "The broad basis," says von Holst, "on which the compromise of 1850 rested, was the conviction of the great majority of the people, both North and South, that it was fair, reasonable, and patriotic to come to a friendly understanding."

       Thus in the midsummer of 1850 did the nation, with intense relief, see the imminent disaster of civil discord averted—or was it only postponed? It was ominous that no men who were deeply in earnest in public affairs were sincerely satisfied. The South saw no gain which offset the destruction of the balance of power by the admission of California. Thinking men at the North were alarmed at the recognition of the principle of non-intervention by Congress concerning slavery in the Territories, a principle which soon, under the seductive title of "popular sovereignty" in the Territories, threatened even that partial restriction heretofore given by the Missouri Compromise. Neither party felt sufficiently secure of the strength of its legal position to be altogether pleased at seeing the doctrine of treating the slave in the Territories as "property" cast into the lottery of the Supreme Court. Lincoln recognized the futility of this whole arrangement, and said truly that the slavery question could "never be successfully compromised." Yet he accepted the situation, with the purpose of making of it the best that was possible. The mass of the people, less far-sighted, were highly gratified at the passing of the great danger; refused to recognize that a more temporary compromise was never patched up to serve a turn; and applauded it so zealously that in preparing for the presidential campaign of 1852 each party felt compelled to declare emphatically—what all wise politicians knew to be false—the "finality" of the great Compromise of 1850. Never, never more was there to be a revival of the slavery agitation! Yet, at the same time, it was instinctively felt that the concord would cease at once if the nation should not give to the South a Democratic President! In this campaign Lincoln made a few speeches in Illinois in favor of Scott; but Herndon says that they were not very satisfactory efforts. Franklin Pierce was chosen, and slavery could have had no better man.

This doctrine of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the Territories lay as the seed of mortal disease imbedded in the vitals of the great Compromise even at the hour of its birth. All the howlings of the political medicine-men in the halls of Congress, and in the wigwams where the party platforms were manufactured, could not defer the inevitable dissolution. The rapid peopling of the Pacific coast already made it imperative to provide some sort of governmental organization for the sparsely inhabited regions lying between these new lands and the fringe of population near the Mississippi. Accordingly bills were introduced to establish as a Territory the region which was afterward divided between Kansas and Nebraska; but at two successive sessions they failed to pass, more, as it seemed, from lack of interest than from any open hostility. In the course of debate it was explained, and not contradicted, that slavery was not mentioned in the bills because the Missouri Compromise controlled that matter. Yet it was well known that the Missouri Compromise was no longer a sure barrier; for one wing of the pro-slavery party asserted that it was unconstitutional on the ground that slaves, being property, could not be touched in the Territories by congressional enactments; while another wing of the party preferred the plausible cry of "popular sovereignty," than which no words could ring truer in American ears; and no one doubted that, in order to give that sovereignty full sway, they would at any convenient moment vote to repeal even the "sacred" Compromise. It could not be denied that this was the better course, if it were practicable; and accordingly, January 16, 1854, Senator Dixon of Kentucky offered an amendment to the pending Nebraska bill, which substantially embodied the repeal. In the Senate Douglas was chairman of the Committee on Territories, and was induced to coöperate.^[63] January 23, 1854, he introduced his famous "Kansas-Nebraska bill," establishing the two Territories and declaring the Missouri Compromise "inoperative" therein. A later amendment declared the Compromise to be "inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850," and therefore "inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this Act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution." After a long and hard fight the bill was passed with this clause in it, which Benton well stigmatized as a "stump speech injected into the belly of the bill." The insertion of the word State was of momentous significance.

      This repeal set the anti-slavery party all ablaze. Among the rest Lincoln was fired with strenuous indignation, and roused from the condition of apparent indifference to public affairs in which he had rested since the close of his term in Congress. Douglas, coming home in the autumn, was so disagreeably received by an angry audience in Chicago that he felt it imperative to rehabilitate his stricken popularity. This difficult task he essayed at the great gathering of the State Fair in October. But Lincoln was put forward to answer him, and was brilliantly successful in doing so, if the highly colored account of Mr. Herndon may be trusted. Immediately after Lincoln's close, Owen Lovejoy, the Abolitionist